This is Why You Can’t Try To Avoid Criticism | Ask DS

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2:26Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics. We're trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording but thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you this is why you can't try to avoid criticism nobody wants to be criticized it doesn't feel good when people judge what you've done we want the right people to like us we want all people to like us we want to be accepted appreciated celebrated so we try to be like other people like the people that everyone likes.

3:22But in the end, does this effort pay off? No, it doesn't. You work hard to preempt criticism, to appeal to the trends, to make people like you, and what happens, they still criticize you. Somebody finds something to find fault with you about. Think of how Marcus Aurelius was savaged by critics in his own time, just as he is today by many academics and philosophers, written off by many historians. Imagine then if he had tried to conform to their expectations, to fit more clearly in the box they wanted him to be in. Imagine if you tried to win the mob's favor or respect of future generations by conquest or dazzling deed.

3:57Imagine if you'd written meditations for an audience instead of far more personal and vulnerable plays. It doesn't matter what you do. The criticism is always going to be there. So you might as well do what you think ought to be done. You might as well do what seems meaningful and important and fulfilling and right to you. People are going to say what they're going to say. Haters will find a way to hate. In the meantime, just be true to yourself. Be true to the mission you have and fight for the respect and praise of yourself, not the mob, not the future. That's hard enough to win anyway.

4:51Yeah, the Stoics say we never step in the same river twice. And so one of the powerful things about reading and then rereading is that the book is the same, but you're different. And what you are open to hearing is different. The experiences you bring to it are different. And so, yeah, I think even in the case of Mark Surreale's meditations, you know, read it many times over the course of my life. and then I read it again in the early days of the pandemic and you go, oh, wait, he was going through the exact same thing that we're going through. And you don't think about it as a plague or a pandemic book because you have no conception unless you're 100 years old.

5:31You have no conception of what that even is. And so, yeah, that's the powerful thing about reading and rereading. I think especially in business or in life, you know, when you find yourself in new situations, you've just taken over a new team or, you know, it's a different market or a different product, go back to some of those books that were influential too early because you didn't know what you were missing, that there was actually the perfect solution to the problem that you had or this perfect insight that just went over your head and you weren't even aware that it was going over your head because it wasn't for you at that moment, but now it is.

6:04Yeah. Awesome. All right, so that was even one of my questions, but that's good. All right, so they all have the book, right? I gave them all the books. Oh, wonderful. I made some notes based on the book. so let's start at the end of the book. Okay. Page 184. Please open your books class. Page 184 if you're curious. So there you talk about, and I think this is good for our team specifically, you know, we talk about philosophy and sometimes we talk about it in the way of, well, you know, we're talking a lot about philosophical things. We want to take more action. The conversations just get very airy-fairy.

6:43And so I love at the end of the book, it says philosophy was never what happened in classroom. It was a set of lessons from the battlefield of life. Yeah, we tend to think of philosophy as like what college professors do, that it's sort of abstract and theoretical, and they're sort of debating these impossible-to-answer of questions. And that is a part of philosophy, particularly as some of the basics have been covered. But when you go back 2 ,000 years ago, or in some cases 2 ,500 years ago even, they were, first off, philosophy wasn't even this thing you could do professionally. These were people who needed the ideas in philosophy to help them what they were doing.

7:30And so they were soldiers or politicians or parents or just, you know, the Stoics were exiled. The Stoics were tortured, as Seneca was talking about. The Stoics experienced the ups and downs of life. And philosophy there was there to help them deal with that, to help them manage their emotions, to help them sort of separate right from wrong, to give them a framework for navigating these troubles. And so I think most people don't wake up and think, oh, today I'm going to be a philosopher. But actually, a person who gets up and manages all the unpredictability of life and tries to adhere to a certain code of conduct or a set of values, who is trying to process all this information that's being thrown at them, trying to understand themselves, that is philosophy.

8:19right and I think what I tried to do in the obstacles way and in all my books is is sort of open up the ranks of who gets to qualify as a philosopher and and understand you know even if you don't care about any of that these were some of the smartest people who ever lived thinking about some of the most perennial and intractable problems that humans have always experienced and And it would be good, I think, to avail ourselves of some of those insights. Yeah. So to kind of piggyback on your last comment, I think oftentimes, you know, in your books, you make things very accessible in terms of like lots of different experiences.

8:58People can kind of see themselves in it. But also it's like, well, I'm not General Mattis. I'm not the Queen. I'm not Kobe Bryant. I'm not Michael Jordan. We marvel at those people. but sometimes I think just kind of work at our nine to five or eight to four 30 or whatever, people miss the opportunity that their life can be every bit as important, unique and impactful. Yeah. One of the, one of the passages in meditations, again, it's so interesting, this guy, he's trained him to be a philosopher. And then he's just sort of thrust into this extremely powerful, important position, which he didn't want, which actually when he was told he would get, he sort of breaks down in tears, sort of has this imposter syndrome of every person before me who has ever taken this job, it has not ended well for them, right?

9:45So that kind of, I think, can sound familiar to people. Sounds familiar to me. Yeah, you know. And by the way, I think that's actually a mark of a good leader. The people who think, oh, there's a number one spot, there's a most powerful person, that's me. I deserve that. That's like the person you want to be a little wary of, right? It's the somewhat reluctant leaders that actually, I think, have a lot of the character traits that leadership, great leadership actually wants or demands. But Marcus is having to reconcile. Here I am, I want to be this person who loves books and ideas and philosophy discussions.

10:16And now I'm judging cases and leading the army and making budget decisions, right? And he writes to himself, he says, you have to remember that no role is so well-suited to philosophy as the one you're in right now. And I think he was referring to the fact that decision-making, dealing with other people, trying to be mutually beneficial, trying to not screw up this thing that he's been given. All of the things that would make for a good emperor are actually sort of basic philosophical issues. And I think that's true for, if it's true for the emperor of Rome 2 ,000 years ago, then I think there's some room for philosophy in any and every job out there right now, including being a parent, including being stuck in traffic.

11:04You know, like this situation that you're in is crying out for you to apply some of these philosophical principles. The values that stoicism is built around, there's four, I have them tattooed on my wrist, the four virtues or values of stoicism are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. And I think one would be hard pressed to find a situation that does not demand one or four of those virtues or most likely some combination of all of them together, right? And so I do think it's really important that we don't think of philosophy as this thing that, you know, tweed jacket wearing college professors can use, but not you.

11:45In fact, you are much more well suited to use it because people are depending on you, people are looking to you, you know, the stakes are higher than just someone who thinks about ideas for a living. Right, right. Awesome. I'm not actually getting my prepared questions. Okay, so talk a little bit, you know, you talked about perception as kind of the number one discipline there. So, you know, when we talk about perception, one of the concepts in the book, and you didn't really touch on it so much in your talk here, but the idea of domestication of emotion. I think in today's world, from social media to everything you see out there, people living their own truths, people wanting to be right, people focused on what they want to say, there's not a lot of domestication of emotions out there.

12:33What's your perception of that and how is that a good thing for us to think about? I was actually thinking about this recently. Maybe if one studies stoic philosophy their entire life, just as if you studied Zen Buddhism your entire life, you meditate every day, you fully commit to this thing, maybe at some point you get to this place where you're above, you know, being jealous or angry or frustrated or afraid, where you've transcended these sort of human destructive urges or desires. Maybe. Maybe not, right? Probably not, if we're being honest. But I think there's something much simpler and much more accessible between where we are now and that sort of idea, what the Stoics would have called like the level of being a sage or a Zen master, I guess, in Buddhism.

13:25And that's when you get angry about something, can you just stop yourself from verbalizing that anger, right? Or when you're in, you know, the sort of feeling kind of a pang of anxiety, can you stop yourself from completely spiraling out of control, right? I think about this, like, you know, I'm upset about something, someone's really pissed me off, and I write out exactly, you know, why this is wrong, and why it's upsetting to me, and what I want, and then can I just not hit send, right? So there's a difference, I think, between being angry and doing something out of anger, just as there's a difference between, you know, being afraid and letting that fear prevent you from showing up or starting the process.

14:16And so again, I don't think stoicism is this sort of transcendence of or elimination of emotion. It's just trying to get those under control a little bit, right? Moment to moment. Moment to moment. And when you do mess up, when you do make a mistake, owning it. Like, you know, I had a rough morning with my kids yesterday and it's like, am I apologizing later in the afternoon or am I apologizing before I dropped off for school? And the faster that cycle happens and then the lesson that's learned from it, you know, that's, I think, a much more attainable, accessible, and frankly, impactful way to think about it instead of aiming at some kind of perfection and then despairing why you're not making it.

15:04To just be a little less emotional in high-stakes situations is an edge over your competitors, or it's an edge over your previous self. And so I think if we think about it much more iteratively and realistically, that's why I like that idea of domesticating your emotions as opposed to eliminating them. right? They're still there, but you're just a little bit more in control. Yeah, and that freedom that people think about sharing all their emotions or telling you why they feel like that's actually a weakness. And like you just said, it is an edge for the other person. So even if you were just looking at it from the standpoint of operating in business and giving your power away, there's a very practical purpose to be more effective.

15:50Yeah, sometimes people talk about radical candor or whatever, and it's like, what if you just shut the fuck up? You know, like one of my favorite passages in meditations is, you know, he says, remember, you always have the power to have no opinion. And he says, things are not asking to be judged by you. I think about that, you know, again, with my kids, how many things, I think about my relationship with my own parents, how much conflict did we have growing up? Because they had opinions about things that they didn't really need to have opinions about that they don't even remember having opinions about, but they cause conflict in the moment, right?

16:25And so much of, I think, the problems in the workplace are about, you know, micromanaging is having an opinion about everything and needing it to be a specific way when you hired these people to do what they know how to do. And you accepted a certain amount of variability and individuality by putting together a team or bringing on other individuals. And so, you know, I think the idea of like, I don't like that, or I have this opinion about this and going, you know, is it constructive? Is it helpful for me to share that? Or can I just keep it to myself and focus on what I need to do? Or, you know, is this thing up to me in some way?

17:07Or am I just It's kind of shouting out into the void or stirring up conflict or disagreeableness because I feel like I have to opine about everything and everyone. Right. Don't worry, team. I wrote down, shut the F. Sorry. More frequently, so I took that note. Let's talk about action. So many questions about action. You know, action is commonplace, but directed action done in the service of the whole. I think that's, we talked a lot about that. Everybody in this room has very specific functions that they're now responsible for. Part of our transformation as a group has been like, we asked a lot of people to do a lot of different things and therefore, you know, wearing a lot of different hats wasn't very effective, but it's all being done in service of the whole.

17:59Can you maybe talk about the directed action piece of things a little more? it's it's fascinating how timeless sort of aimlessness and busyness uh can be in in one of seneca's essays he talks about he's sort of stepping back he's looking at all these you know powerful romans leaving their house in the morning bustling around going here and there and to meetings and events and you know uh reading about this and talking about this and and he says but if you sort of ask them, you know, what are you doing? What are you working towards? Where is this going? So they wouldn't really have a good answer.

18:36And he said, you could define all this in a phrase, he said, it's busy idleness. And, you know, yeah, look, a lot of people aren't doing enough. And they're procrastinating, they're waiting for people to take care of stuff, they don't have initiative. But then inside companies, inside, you know, teams or groups, you can sometimes find that initiative, that desire to make decisions to get moving, can be counterproductive if it's not tied to a strategy, if it's not tied to, you know, a real clear sense of how each action fits into a larger whole. One of my mentors, the great Robert Greene, would talk about how he said there's tactical hell and then strategic heaven.

19:27And he says, you know, most people are kind of caught in this tactical hell. They're just like responding to this, doing that. There's kind of that busy idleness. They're just, you know, going around and around and around. They don't really have a clear picture of why they're doing stuff, where it's going. So, you know, I do think that when you're trying to solve a problem or dig yourself out of some big hole, it's like, hey, do I have a real clear plan here? Do I have a real clear sense of where each of these decisions or actions fits into, you know, making forward, meaningful progress as opposed to just, you know, reassuring myself that, you know, I'm so busy I haven't had time to think about what's really happening or where this is going?

20:09Right. You talked a little bit about the process, finishing it well. But I talked a little bit earlier with the group about making your work really a masterpiece. Sure. The craftsmanship of things. What are your thoughts on that? What's always struck me about meditations, which I know I've been talking about quite a bit, but here you have the most powerful man in the world writing this journal to himself. He never expects it to be published. He's not thinking about anyone or anything. He's just trying to get his thoughts down on paper. And yet, he clearly has these incredibly high standards. He's writing in Greek, which is the language of philosophy instead of Latin, which is the sort of the more common language at the time.

20:55And there's these beautiful sentences and phrases. It kind of reminds me of Steve Jobs that he learned from his father who was a carpenter that even the back of the cabinets should be beautiful. And even though the customer will never see them. And if you open a MacBook, inside the MacBook, even like the circuitry and the boards are sort of beautifully done. They're not just, oh, this is ugly, so let's hide it. And I've always been struck by, in meditations, this sense of like really mastering what you're doing, even if, not because you're trying to impress people, not because you want them to marvel at how great you are, but treating it as a masterpiece because it's something you control and that's the standard you set for yourself, that you don't cut corners, you don't phone it in, you don't let yourself off the hook.

21:44These are all cliches, but the idea is I take what I do extremely seriously and I'm doing it great for me. You know, I'm keeping my workspace clean. You know, I am not handing things half finished to someone else. I am, you know, doing everything I can do. I think that's just such a beautiful way of thinking about it. And then, you know, that's not a lesson that we all learned as a kid. And maybe at different jobs, you know, the expectations were different. But I think that's a great sort of standard to impose on yourself. that I'm not sloppy, I'm not, I don't leave anything half done, I just, I care about how it looks and comes off and is because I care about it.

22:34And I know ultimately that does tend to translate into greater success, but it's sort of intrinsically rewarding just to make things as good as they can be because that's what you want to do. And what's incredible about meditations is here is this work that's not intended for the audience, that he'd probably be mortified that we're talking about, but we are talking about 2 ,000 years later, that's how good it is, and it's accessible to all of these people because it's so personal, because he slaved over every sentence. He actually did make something that sort of stood the test of time.

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